Smoke and Mirrors
by DreadNot
Summary: Was I frightened? I was petrified. Pip Bernadette tells the story of his time with Hellsing. PxS. Warnings: Spoilers for Volume 7, strong profanity. One Shot


_She smells like angels ought to smell._

Not a thought I'd ever thought I'd have while dying. "Shit fuck!" or "I hope they send the money to my family," always seemed like the sort of thoughts that would go through my mind while dying. At least, they were the thoughts that had gone through my mind the times before when I was sure I was dying.

Like the time I lost my eye.

But that's a story for another time.

This is the story of my death, not my near death experiences.

I should have known not to take the contract, but I couldn't resist. It sounded like a cushy job sitting back in England and not getting our balls shot at on a daily basis. The pay was good and the guy hiring us was a straight-laced English _nut_. He had to be a nut, right? He said he was hiring us to hunt vampires; that pretty much puts him in nut category with no problem.

The Geese have worked for nuts before. The gigs are usually interesting, even if sometimes – like this time – they're deadly.

Things went well for a while. It turned out the straight-laced English guy wasn't as much of a nut as I had thought. Still a little bit of a nut, but not much, and I couldn't really say what it was about him that always felt a bit, well, different. Some instinct always told me that underestimating him would be a bad idea.

Still, he was just a butler.

Who hires mercenaries for a vampire hunting organization. Right.

The Boss. The _real_ Boss was a gorgeous woman. Hot. But in a very cool, even chilly kind of way. She was young, but you wouldn't know it to hear her voice or see her give orders. She learned hard and she learned fast and she was a better commander than many I'd known in my day.

Good thing I have a policy of never, ever getting personal with the Boss, male or female. Because her weapon would have killed me without blinking, given half a chance. I'm not talking about her gun, unless you want to say that she pulled out the big guns when she used her vampire. Big Red was something else. Over two meters of grinning, shooting lust for death. I thought he was bad back at the beginning, but I had no idea how bad he'd be at the end.

Sure, there were more people there – the clerks and the intelligence people and the people who spent their time making sure we had weapons that would handle vampires. But they lacked the power that the Big Four had. They didn't stand out, and _they_ didn't save the world.

The last of the Big Four was different. Female like the Boss. A vampire like Big Red. Dangerous without seeming it like the Butler. The Girly was a little bit of everything.

But she wasn't like any of the rest of us. She was made to kill, but she was the only person in an organization filled with killers who hadn't figured out how to live with that yet.

The rest of us, from the Geese right on up to the big Boss lady, knew we were killers. Hell, at least the Boss and the Butler did it for ideals, or they pretended to. Her pet vampire did it because the Boss owned him – not my place to judge how – be it his heart or his nuts or just through some magic spell they never told us grunts about. And the Geese? We just did it for the money.

So here's this Girly who stood out from everyone else because despite the fangs and the great breasts and short skirt, she was innocent.

She got on my last damned nerve more than once, too. And I taunted her and teased her and got more than a few good laughs out of making her white, white skin turn pink when she blushed. Who knew vampires could blush?

She fought it. None of us killers could really understand it. You do what you have to do and that's it. You don't agonize over your fate, you don't fear for the state of your soul, you do what you signed on for and that's all there is to it.

I'm not sure when she started to grow on me. Maybe in Brazil?

I'd say Brazil was when things started to go to shit. Had to have been then. With the body count insanely high and the crazy priest showing up at our door and Big Red trying to teach the Girly about war in the middle of scattered blood and guts.

Yeah, things started getting pretty shitty right about then.

But we made it back to England and I had that feeling in my gut that told me it was time to cut and run if I didn't want to die for someone else's cause.

Feeling in my gut? If you call watching a freaky little vampire nazi catboy appear out of nowhere with a portable video screen a feeling in my gut. The catboy set it up and it proceeded to display the weirdest scene of Nazi vampires ripping apart old Nazis. All the while the catboy and the Fat Man talked like what was going on was nothing.

Freaks. Fuckin' freaks. Big Red was crazy, he might even have been this kind of crazy if he had half a chance, but he didn't. He served the Boss and that was that. He did love the freaks, though. I'd learned that the happier he was, the worse things were going to get. Big Red was so happy my End of the World alarms were going off.

The last time I saw Big Red with my own eye, we'd just gotten back from that selfsame conference. The next I knew of him, he was going to be dropped on some aircraft carrier like a bomb. All I could think was that they were nuking the carrier, dropping him on it.

Come to think of it, that was just about the last time I laid my eye on the Boss or the Butler.

From here on, things went from pretty shitty to highly fubared.

The Nazis came in hard and fast. They sent an entire zeppelin just to attack Hellsing headquarters. We were that important. Big Red was stranded in the Atlantic, the Boss and the Butler were MIA; just the Geese and the Girly were at headquarters to fight.

I know I've been running a good stream of talk so far, but this next part is difficult to describe. So much was happening so fast and so violently that all you could do was react to what was coming in right now and hang on for dear life. Typical. It was a war, after all.

Funny thing is, it wasn't so bad at first. Scary as hell with vampires storming the mansion, but for all that, still just war. I'd been doing that most of my life, or at least it felt that way.

So here I've told you about the Girly and her little innocence problem. That night she got a hold on what she'd been unable to before. She learned how to accept that she was going to have to do some killing to protect people. She stood between the Geese and those vampires and she was brilliant.

Then came the giant. _A giant._ She was unbelievably huge and when she cut into the mansion with her scythe, I was sure that it was the end. If I'd died at that moment, my last words _would_ have been, "Shit fuck!" They would have made sense in the middle of all that.

I was in some strange territory. Was I frightened? I was petrified.

And it was the girly who saw through it. She pulled us together enough to try to fall back when the vampires cut through our defensive line. She bought us a little more time to retreat into the Round Table conference room. I thought it was about right that a bunch of scum dog mercenaries like us would die where the secret rulers of England had met.

My men died and I got to listen to their last moments. Technology can drop war right in your lap – the next best thing to being there.

Fuck.

I didn't let my men see it, but for a few minutes, I thought the Girly had failed us after all. I was surprised by how I felt about that. Not just afraid of death – I was used to that one. Can't be a mercenary, son of a mercenary, son of the son of a mercenary, without learning how to fight through that fear. I was afraid for her.

Right in the middle of hell is a bullshit time to form attachments. That didn't stop me from doing it anyway.

Those undead fuckers just kept pulling out more surprises. Wasn't enough that they were stronger, faster, immune to regular bullets, and had some sort of ugly bitch of a witch with them, they had bazookas, too. I found that out the hard way when I caught some shrapnel.

It was getting harder to stay optimistic. Shit, that's an understatement. I was starting to wonder if I should hope they'd rip me apart, or if I should stick a gun to my head at the last moment to avoid turning into a corpse that ate corpses.

Gotta love the Girly's sense of timing.

I wanted to kiss her so bad. If you've ever been _this_ close to death and been pulled back from the brink, you know that every human thing in you wants to shout, "I'm alive, you fucks! And I'm going to do every last goddamn thing that makes me alive!" I wanted to kiss her and tell her I loved her and tell her what a good goddamned girl she was.

It's no wonder I did what I did. Not at that moment in that place. I could _not _watch that tattooed whore kill our Girly. I couldn't watch her maim our gunner girl and blind her and torture her, even knowing it was almost definitely the end of me to go out there.

I didn't have a choice. Not if I wanted to stay human in the ways that really matter.

It felt damned good to wipe that smile off of that beast's face – to pound it off with a rifle stock and follow that up with a few bullets. It was so good to shut her up.

I should have picked up that scythe of hers and taken off her head. I fucked up.

The Girly was heavier than I thought she'd be. For a tiny little girl (even with those breasts) I thought she'd be easier to carry. Must have been the shrapnel I was carrying in my gut that was making everything so heavy.

I still let myself hope. I could get her behind the barricade. We could give her blood. There were plenty of men who didn't need theirs anymore.

Just a little farther.

I tried so goddamn hard, and for all that I failed.

I kept going while I wasted blood on the floor. I kept going when the bullets cut into my legs. I kept going when she told me to leave her.

I should have taken that scythe and cut off that bitch's head. Because I didn't, I got to make the hero's sacrifice.

I couldn't keep going when she buried that thing in my back. I knew, with no doubt at all, that I was going to die.

The mind works fast when it knows it's counting down its last moments. I had two thoughts – I was going to get that kiss before I died, and I wasn't going to let my death mean my failure in saving our Girly.

I wasn't scared anymore.

That kiss was just about worth dying for. She wasn't expecting it, couldn't see it coming, but when my mouth closed over hers, she didn't fight or pull away. I could taste her and smell her and _it_ ran through my mind, _She smells like angels ought to smell._ My angel.

No shame in dying for a girl like her.

Drink my blood. Drink, and we'll go crushing them together, Seras.

Next time, I'll tell you the story of my rebirth.

* * *

This fic meets a Sin City quote challenge and LiveJournal's **fictionhaven**'s quote challenge for their June writing contest. 

**Sin City  
Marv:** She smells like angels ought to smell.

**About A Boy  
Will:** I was in some strange territory. Was I frightened? I was petrified.

_I own none of these characters, the quotes or the media from which they were taken. I make no money for my writing and make no claim otherwise._


End file.
